It is broadly assumed that attempts by the Russian state of Muscovy to establish stable diplomatic and mercantile channels to India via Central Asia were started upon the initiative of the Emperor Peter I (1682–1725). Such attempts are generally interpreted as being part of a large-scale project that reflected the growing imperial and colonial ambitions of Russia and which, in turn, entailed strong antagonism from the ruling elites of Central Asia, thereby setting a tone for relations that would continue for the next century and more of reciprocal relations between the local principalities and Russia. By exploring chancellery documents from seventeenth-century Muscovy, we find that the first diplomatic communications between Russia, Khiva, and Bukhara can in fact be dated to long before the reign of Peter I. The first Romanov tsars sought to initiate exchanges with Khiva and Bukhara as a means of establishing diplomatic and commercial ties with the Mughal emperors; at the same time, meanwhile, the authorities in Khiva and Bukhara had their own reasons for pushing Muscovy to engage with Central Asia as a conduit to India. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Central Asian diplomats went to great lengths—both in diplomatic correspondence and through direct interpersonal contacts—to convince their Russian counterparts of the region's attractiveness as a source of precious Indian commodities and as a logistically convenient passage to India. Despite such rhetoric, however, the authorities in Khiva and Bukhara were in fact highly reluctant to “open” the region to Russian agents: repeated attempts by Muscovy to engage in diplomatic fact-finding as a means of establishing influence in the region invariably foundered in the face of Central Asian resistance. Bukharan and Khivan circles seem, in fact, to have held out the enticing idea of “a passage to India” simply as a rhetorical device to secure recognition in Muscovy for their own diplomatic and mercantile missions.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Section 3 Notifications Document 37: A Notification by a Provincial Governor to the yasāvulbāshī about a Case of Assault and Robbery187 204 The term bakhshī occurs often in Khorezmian sources written in the 19th and the early 20th century and it usually couples with the names of the headmen of several Turkmen tribes. According to Bregel, this term was in use especially among the Yomut Turkmens of Khorezm, see his Khorezmskie turkmeny v XIX veke, pp. 124-125; 128-129.One could therefore infer that the boy belonged to a group of Yomuts. 205 Turtkul, or Petro-Aleksandrovsk, was the administrative center of the Amu-Darya Department (otdel), i.e., the part of the Khivan Khanate, which was conquered by the Russians and included into the Governorship-General of Turkestan in 1873. The Amu-Darya Department was established as an administrative unit on August the 21st 1873 and it was located circa 40 miles from Khiva. For more on this subject, see the introduction to this volume. 206 Berdanka is the colloquial form for the Russian rifle invented by the American colonel Hiram Berdan in 1868. See also above, the footnote to Doc. 25.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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